by Daniel Hathaway
IN THIS EDITION:
. Third FranckFest Brownbag Concert caps the Noontime Concert Series at Trinity Cathedral & WCLV broadcasts joint April 5 ChamberFest Cleveland & Cleveland Chamber Music Society collaboration
. British organist and choirmaster Simon Preston dies at 83
. Interesting read: Composer Brett Dean discusses his Hamlet chord
. Almanac: Froberger, Böhm, Pinza, Fischer-Dieskau make debuts while Mahler and Anderson exit.
TODAY’S EVENTS:
At 12:00 pm the Trinity Cathedral Brownbag Concert Series wraps up its season as well as its three-concert César FranckFest with music in celebration of the Belgian composer’s 200th birthday. Nicole Keller & Todd Wilson, organ, Mark Laseter, tenor & Pam Kelly, cello. Chorale in b minor (Keller), Panis angelicus, Pastorale, Sortie l’Organiste & Chorale in E. Trinity Cathedral, 2230 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. Freewill offering. Hybrid concert will also be livestreamed and archived.
Tonight at 8, WCLV will broadcast the April 5 collaboration between ChamberFest Cleveland and the Cleveland Chamber Music Society at the Maltz PAC on its Cleveland Ovations series. On that occasion, the Dover String Quartet shared the stage with ChamberFest artistic directors Diana Cohen, Franklin Cohen, and Roman Rabinovich in “For the Love of Chamber Music.” The playlist: Mozart’s Kegelstatt Trio, K. 498, Ravel’s String Quartet & Ernest Chausson’s Concerto, Op. 21 for violin, piano & string quartet.
To check out concerts happening this week see our Concert Listings.
IN MEMORIAM:
British organist and choirmaster Simon Preston (pictured above) died on May 13 at the age of 83. The former organ scholar at King’s College, Cambridge, who went on to posts at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford, and Westminster Abbey and made more than 100 recordings, is remembered here in a 2016 Gramophone article by Mark Rochester.
INTERESTING READ:
New York Times — ”The ‘Hamlet’ Chord: A Composer’s Music of Indecision.” Brett Dean, whose adaptation of the classic play is at the Metropolitan Opera, discusses the four notes that embody Hamlet’s dilemma. Read David Allen’s article here.
CCMS SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT:
In the email blast announcing tonight’s broadcast of its April 5 collaboration with ChamberFest Cleveland, the Cleveland Chamber Music Society noted its lineup for its 73rd season in 2022-2023. Here are the dates and performers: September 13: Wu Han, Philip Setzer & David Finckel. October 18: Academy of St Martin in the Fields Chamber Ensemble. November 15: Jupiter Quartet. February 21: Paul Huang, Danbi Um & Amy Yang. March 14: Bennewitz Quartet. March 28: Anthony McGill, Susanna Philips & Myra Huang. May 2: Jerusalem Quartet.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Let us now praise famous musicians who arrived or departed on May 18.
First, two German composers. Johann Froberger was born on this date in 1616 in Stuttgart, and Georg Böhm took his leave in Luneburg in 1733.
When not in the service of the noble families of Stuttgart, Froberger traveled throughout Europe, establishing himself as a virtuoso organist and harpsichordist, and was the inventor of the dance suite that served the formal needs of composers well into the 18th century. He also pushed the Arca Musarithmica, an early A.I. device that assisted in the creation of music.
Watch French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau perform Suites by Froberger — and by Louis Couperin, whose music he influenced — in a live broadcast from Salle Cortot in Paris in 2020, and read more about the Arca Musarithmica here.
Böhm was working for the French-influenced court in Luneburg when Johann Sebastian Bach was a teenaged chorister at a church down the street. Enjoy two of Böhm’s engaging works played on the Schnitger organ in Groningen by Wim van Beek. We’ll start with his multi-sectioned Präludium in g, then move on to his variations on Freu dich sehr, o meine Seele — the next-to-last variation introduces some stunning blue notes into the harmony.
Two basses come up in today’s list: the birth of Ezio Pinza in Rome in 1892, and the death of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in 2012. We featured the latter in an earlier Diary, so we’ll move on to Pinza, who, despite never having learned to read music, enjoyed a long and distinguished opera career beginning in Milan under Toscanini and continuing at the MET in New York.
Watch some rare video of Pinza rehearsing for a Bell Telephone Hour program in 1947, and recall his second career on Broadway in clips from Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific, where he appeared opposite Mary Martin as the French planter Emil de Becque.
German composer and conductor Gustav Mahler died in Vienna on this date in 1911, leaving nine-and-a-half monumental symphonies that were performed during his lifetime, but languished until their revival later in the century, notably by Leonard Bernstein. The works suited the conductor’s extroverted personality, as can be witnessed in this 1973 performance of No. 2, the “Resurrection” Symphony, at Ely Cathedral. (In 2018, the film of the performance was screened at Ely, preceded by interviews). I had the unforgettable experience of singing the work with Bernstein and the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood in the early 70s.
The roots of Mahler’s music are explored by Bernstein’s spiritual successor, Michael Tilson Thomas, in two episodes of Keeping Score with the San Francisco Symphony.
Finally, on this date in 1975, American composer and arranger Leroy Anderson died in Woodbury, Connecticut. Long associated with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops, the Harvard grad was famous for such light classics as Bugler’s Holiday, played here by Cleveland Orchestra principal trumpet Michael Sachs with the UCLA Wind Ensemble and two of his young colleagues. Occasionally, Anderson aspired to more ambitious works. Watch a rare performance of his Piano Concerto here.